Marriage of Blanche DuBois and Allan Grey

The marriage of Blanche DuBois and Allan Grey is the hidden wound at the center of A Streetcar Named Desire, a brief, catastrophic union whose aftermath shapes every lie, every gesture, and every collapse that follows. Blanche was sixteen when she met Allan, a boy she describes as extremely good-looking, and she loved him not merely but worshipped the ground he walked on, adoring him and thinking him almost too fine to be human. The discovery of love came all at once and much, much too completely, like a blinding light turned on something that had always been half in shadow. But there was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which was not like a man's, although he was not the least bit effeminate looking. He came to her for help, but she did not know that; she did not find out anything until after their marriage, when they had run away and come back, and all she knew was that she had failed him in some mysterious way and was not able to give the help he needed but could not speak of. He was in the quicksands and clutching at her, but she was not holding him out, she was slipping in with him. She loved him unendurably but without being able to help him or help herself.

The Discovery and the Suicide

Blanche found out the truth in the worst of all possible ways, by coming suddenly into a room that she thought was empty but which had two people in it: the boy she had married and an older man who had been his friend for years. Afterwards the three of them pretended that nothing had been discovered, driving out to Moon Lake Casino, very drunk and laughing all the way. The polka tune called the Varsouviana was playing. Suddenly in the middle of the dance, the boy she had married broke away from her and ran out of the casino. A few moments later a shot was heard. Blanche ran out, as everyone did, and gathered about the terrible thing at the edge of the lake. She could not get near for the crowding. Then somebody caught her arm and said, "Don't go any closer! Come back! You don't want to see!" She heard voices say Allan's name, and that he had stuck the revolver into his mouth and fired, so that the back of his head had been blown away. It was because on the dance floor, unable to stop herself, she had suddenly said, "I saw! I know! You disgust me." And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again, and never for one moment since has there been any light that is stronger than a kitchen candle.

Aftermath and Haunting

After Allan's death, intimacies with strangers was all Blanche seemed able to fill her empty heart with. She describes it as panic, just panic, that drove her from one to another, hunting for some protection here and there, in the most unlikely places, even, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy. The Varsouviana polka becomes a recurring auditory hallucination, the music in her mind that she drinks to escape, and it always stops only after she hears the distant revolver shot. When Stanley Kowalski, during their first conversation, asks Blanche what happened to her marriage, the polka music rises up faintly in the distance, and she answers only that the boy died. Later, when she confesses the full story to Harold Mitchell (Mitch), she says that sometimes there is God so quickly, as if the brief moment of understanding and tenderness he offers is a kind of grace. But the marriage is also the key that Stanley uses to destroy her: he tells Stella that Blanche's young husband was a degenerate, and he later tells Blanche himself, during the rape, that they have had this date with each other from the beginning, as if the violence of that original loss has been waiting all along to repeat itself. The marriage of Blanche DuBois and Allan Grey is not merely a past event but a permanent, bleeding presence, the origin of her lies, her drinking, her terror of light, and her final, fragile dependence on the kindness of strangers.